Southern DHB specialist services executive director Patrick Ng said the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner at Dunedin Hospital experienced a serious fault on August 17.
An MRI helps diagnose a disease or injury. The scanner was "highly complex and dangerous", due to the strength of the magnetic fields it generated, Mr Ng said.
"Consequently, when more serious faults do occur, identifying the specific part required and the subsequent repair can be time consuming.’’
Finding the most likely cause of the fault "unfortunately took much of the past week", Mr Ng told the Otago Daily Times on Thursday.
He expected the replacement part to arrive today and the MRI to be fixed on Monday.
"The length of the outage has been exacerbated by uncertainties and delays in shipping the part from overseas, which, owing to Covid-19, are largely outside of the control of both Southern DHB and the equipment vendor."
If the MRI service at Dunedin Hospital resumed when expected, about 130 elective patients would have been affected by the outage, he said.
Patients affected by the outage would be scheduled into appointments on the basis of clinical acuity.
"We will be doing everything possible to ensure that patients who require an examination in the near future are scheduled for one as soon as possible."
The Southern DHB had worked hard to provide MRI scans to the most urgent patients during the wait for the part to arrive.
Some patients had been able to be examined privately by Pacific Radiology and others would be scanned in Timaru by South Canterbury DHB, he said.
"Southern DHB very much appreciates the support both Pacific Radiology and South Canterbury DHB have provided to its urgent patients.’’
The board appreciated the hard work its MRI technologists and administration staff had put into postponing appointments and working with referrers to ensure its most urgent patients continued to receive necessary MRI examinations safely, Mr Ng said.
